Morning, MOM! Moonglow is moving back for the summer tomorrow. I have some of her shit stuff in the truck to unpack today and make the last trip up tomorrow for the rest. Crumbs, dustkittens, clutter. Hopefully no cockroaches.

Morning, MOM!! Science has saved the day for librarians, book indexers, encyclopaedists, and others who struggle with sorting lists especially in software. It's so simple and elegant, you'd think everyone would know it. You just use the Intelligent Design Principle of Sorting.

NEw Scientist reports:

"Intelligent sort is easy

ANYONE who studied computer science will recall the huge intellectual effort that goes into creating and understanding algorithms for sorting lists efficiently. Perhaps this has all been superseded. Aidan Karley directs us to an apparently watertight algorithm developed by David Morgan-Mar, who calls it the Intelligent Design Sort (IDS).

The probability of the input list being in the exact order it's in, Morgan-Mar notes, is 1 divided by the factorial of the length of the list. So for a list of just 10 items, that's 1/3,628,800; for 11, it's 1/39,916,800, and so on. Morgan-Mar says: "There is such a small likelihood of this that it's clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an Intelligent Sorter." He is of course following the arguments of proponents of intelligent design, whereby apparently vastly improbable structures - such as an eye - must have been designed.

Morgan-Mar suggests that applying the IDS to any list will reveal that it is already optimally arranged in a way "that transcends our naive mortal understanding of 'ascending order'. Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted."

See www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/intelligentdesignsort.html for a short exposition of the advantages of this view (and see the rest of his site to judge how serious Morgan-Mar is).

Indexing and cataloguing both depend on sorting by carefully chosen criteria. So Feedback wonders whether all library catalogues and web indexes could not, by a similar argument concluding that no work actually needs to be done, be replaced by a single instruction always to consult the same document for the answer to any question."

As a result of Amos' post I have fired the entire Technical Services staff, everyone in Reference, and trimmed the collection to one volume of the "Encyclopedia Galactica" (vol. LXXIV part A, to be precise). Also, the World Wide Web will only allow you access to this post on MOAB.

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many hidden-variables theories would be ruled out if a certain experimental inequality were violated – known as "Bell's inequality". In his thought experiment, a source fires entangled pairs of linearly-polarized photons in opposite directions towards two polarizers, which can be changed in orientation. Quantum mechanics says that there should be a high correlation between results at the polarizers because the photons instantaneously "decide" together which polarization to assume at the moment of measurement, even though they are separated in space. Hidden variables, however, says that such instantaneous decisions are not necessary, because the same strong correlation could be achieved if the photons were somehow informed of the orientation of the polarizers beforehand.

Bell's trick, therefore, was to decide how to orient the polarizers only after the photons have left the source. If hidden variables did exist, they would be unable to know the orientation, and so the results would only be correlated half of the time. On the other hand, if quantum mechanics was right, the results would be much more correlated – in other words, Bell's inequality would be violated.

Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell's inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics.

Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.

They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."

I just know the granola birds here in California will grow fat on this, once they start to decode it. They won't decode it right, but they'll pluck out the fattest buzzwords and fly off to feed them to their young.

17471

I'll tell you a little secret--I skim those articles that Amos posts. You don't get so sea sick that way. Pick up enough along the way so you recognize the punch line if there is one and you'll do fine. :)

Aw, it's okay, Still...I wuz funnin' witchoo. These impenetrable simontifique things are funny because they often ARE impenetrable even when the core development is interesting. I skim them myself!! :D

Sjpeakin' of scientific things, Mom, I had a growth removed from the inside of my upper left thigh this afternoon. Yessir, the removal didn't hurt a bit, except that the injection of anny's thetic was QUITE a jolt. And right now I'm on hydrocodone.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

At least the good doc didn't get a bit wild with scalpels and scissors!

And yes, it hurt and that's why I had it removed. And no, it wasn't malignant (but it will be checked anyway).

"Last I heard o' Q. Wyatt," the barkeep responded thoughtfully, "was when he said he was gonna go back to Arkansas to find his little sister, Moonshine. Said he thought she was wukkin' at some place called Copper Kettle. Ain't heard from him since..."

Mainly thought he smelled trouble and was worried his good-for-nothing brother Q. Wyatt might be getting into trouble. He left the bar and strode to the Western Union office, determined to send a cable to the law firm he knew he could trust -- Manly and Still, from Indiana. His father's firm, once. He sighed, and started writing his message in careful block letters on the cheap yellow form.

The cheap yellow form had grown tired of its tawdry existence, spent in the drawers of third class stationery. It yearned to rest on mahogany desks next to a bust of Persephone, and be written on with a $150 pen. The cheap yellow form had its mind made up. It would be a cheap form no longer.

Manly and Still from Indiana had gathered for a late-morning coffee in their third-floor office when the secretary brought them the reincarnation of the cheap yellow form, now a crisp alert yellow page with significant white strips of lettering on it, forming the message from Mainly Still, from Indiana.

We haven't heard from Hector Ballsworthy (of the Independent Press) in some time. Nor have we heard from Doktor Liebenscheiss. Perhaps Ballsworthy can be persuaded to interview Leiebenscheiss one of these days?

Ack, Leedle Hack, it iss goot to schee you back, ja? You haff been avay? I am schorry to schay I neffer do interfiews, especially mit people curshed by nominal determinism into actink out Fweudian mellerdramas.